Umineko: Fanfictional Apocalypse
by Dithyrambs of The Antipodes
Summary: The Devious Plotters plan to take over the world using Fanfiction and Shipping as their weapons. Can the Umineko cast stop them?
**Untitled**

 _Written by Unnamed_

 **Untitled**

"Battler!"  
Beatrice's harsh yell awoke Battler from his lewd, lewd, dreams. "I've just been making the best of our visit to the beach, is there anything wrong with that, Beato?""No... I suppose not. But still - to daydream whilst in the middle of torture! With a superior being at that - have mortals lost all sense of respect these last thousand years?""Ihihihi!~ It certainly seems that way! But as for me, I'm just happy to relax after that last match. Bondage was never really my fetish, heehee~"  
Battler joked around, but the experience had... hardly been the best in his life. His leash for a rub! Certainly there were better things that he could imagine. But he could hardly complain now, here at the beach scene. Beato had even let her hair down, the closest thing to nudity in all of Umineko, for this intermission."Hi guys! It's me! The most loli-ific witch in the world! The strongest of strong, the most cute-  
"H-hey, Battler, what did you just do? Did you... PINCH MY NOSE!?""N-nooooo, of couuurse not... oww! Beato, why!"  
"Battler, when I told you to improve your greetings, I didn't mean to replace sexual harrasement with infantile pinching.""L-look! If you want to say hello to Battler-kun, you'll just have to do it the Battler way! Ihihihi~ow"  
Beato's slap on his right cheek hit just as Lambda got on her tippy toes to reach his other side with her own righteous slap. Being a loli is harder than the daki-resellers give them credit for.  
Anyone watching this may have felt it to be a touching scene between old friends who were past caring about any single transgression, but the most difficult of games was still fresh in the minds of the two combatants and their advisor. It would not seem to such an observer that in the mansion, overlooking them were two devious plotters, who would bring shipping to the their safe, happy world by any means necessary...On a deserted street, two people, without any discernible reaction to one another, each signaled to the other. It was... the plotters.  
They had certainly been defeated in the situation with Cage; that had been unexpected, and with their retreat from the Chapel, they had also lost their access to all of the creators they had kidnapped...  
Their plan to spread shipping to the whole world by infecting the works of the intellectual luminaries of the world, like Ryukishi07 and David Cage was a complete failure.  
The second Plotter was angry.  
As they found their way to a back alley after having independently checked every angle in the entire street along with every possible lighting using their amazing Plot Powers, they began to talk.  
The second plotter finally began to allow their anger to show on their face.  
"Humiliated! By those blockheaded Ushiromiyas! How could this happen..!?"  
'Now, now," the first began, "treat it as a learning experience. Destroying the world with the infernal forces of shipping is a kind of graduation, isn't it? After Plotting is done we go to the University of OCs where we will finally be able... to create our own characters... "  
To create ones own characters in the fanfiction community required many things ever since President Trump had taken his office. He had, with that supreme beneficient generousness that comes with being rich in Western society, given the entire fanfiction movement...  
a small loan of a million OCs.  
But these could not be stolen. Once these first million were exhaused...  
the creation of new OCs required mastering the lower art of Shipping.  
The Plotters had always been fanfiction fanatics, friendly only to those who gave their fanfics positive reviews...  
thus, having never listened to criticism, they could never get better.  
But... if the entire world was forced into the service of Shipping, it would cease to be called a lower art, and so, the stigma attached to them as producers merely of Shipping would go away, and finally, they could create their own original characters...  
"I say no!".. the second Plotter was filled with rage.  
"I've poisoned their dinner. They will not survive this night."  
"That doesn't really seem that devious. We're supposed to do credit to our full titles, Devious Plotters"  
"I care not. I cannot accept what has been done to us! So much work undone!"  
Just how did this plotter poison every single foodstuff in the entire kitchen of the first, non-hidden mansion on Rokkenjima?  
It's quite simple.  
He had gone to the high-class shopping centre where Gohda made his purchases...  
And prepared his plan...Gohda walked into the place... he was smirking as he thought about how much street cred he would get among the hot chefs of the world, after this dinner he was preparing...  
The Devious Plotter had knocked out the normal owner of the store... Gohda was confused for just a second...Gohda was surprised but like the unbelievably talented and charismatic chef that he absolutely _knew_ he was he quickly recovered and was sure that his momentary lapse had not even been noticed...The Plotter smiled almost sweetly at his attempt to hide this misstep, and invited him to take a look at some of his amazing new stock... he...  
decided to have some fun with this innocently arrogant man."Take a look at this!", he said, taking out a bag of the Devious Poison which could subsist on the surface of any kind of food for over a decade and which if put into drink would last for even longer...  
as the excess of the poison fell onto the ground, the sheer amount of deadly components began to erode the very ground under their feet...  
as they moved to safer ground Gohda thought about how such an ingredient could add just the right amount of spice, unexpected taste and throat-gnawing pain to any gourmet.  
He therefore looked on admiringly at the black-brown poison, the bag containing which had mutated maggots also crawling out of it... "Hold on here, what is that?"  
"Why it's the hot new thing this season...! All the hot-shot chefs are using it... didn't you know!?"Now, the idea of being left behind by a culinary trend was to Gohda like the idea of having to make a mystery that didn't revolve around closed rooms was like to Beatrice...  
Gohda to begin to sweat as he imagined the Ushiromiya family abusing him...  
He had to maintain his position on the top of the pile of amazingly made food! If he fell off he'd land in the condiments!  
The...  
determination...  
was ...  
without even opening his eyes...  
ran across the entire store...!  
He bought every single item of food, even the ones he had no intention of using for any of his recipes...  
just in case!  
And each time he scooped up a foodstuff off of the shelf, he would tear apart whatever packaging there was and cover the item with the poison... he  
...already called it "Gohda's Magical Sugar" in his head and that was how he would introduce it at dinner...  
it fell off the food and covered his suit.  
Thank God, he wore so many layers that he could survive this...  
for underneath his suit...  
was his Gohda Magic Chef outfit he wore when he used his food-based superpowers to stop crime...The Plotter was amused at how easily Gohda doomed the family he was sworn to serve...  
It was so...  
d  
e  
v  
i  
o  
u  
s...  
he smiled...As for the other Devious Plotter, at this time the first Devious Plotter had been at a local bar preparing for their meeting...  
David Cage had released a tech demo called "Beware Two Plotters" which warned the people of the Plotters..  
One of the people in the bar noticed the Plotter..."Hey you! You're one of those plotters!"  
With just a little smile... the plotter entire bar had slowly risen...  
they knew what was at stake-the entire fate of culture...  
both Gaijin and true culture was put at risk by the spread of Shipping!  
Everyone in the bar pulled out their weapons...  
knives, harsh words, guns... some of the most dangerous even used...Fanfiction with OCs...The Plotter threw himself into battle!  
There were forty people opposing him!  
He took out his own twin guns and dove for cover,  
Even though he was under fire... he had spent a lot of time in America...  
He admired his pistols.  
He kissed the butt of his guns.  
Metaphorically this was a accurate representation of the US's issues with guns, but now is not the time!  
He jumped..!Narrowly avoiding a hail of bullets...!  
He kicked the table he was under into the air and ran behind it as it flew towards the advance guard of his enemies...  
As it hit them, he emerged from this cover and with amazing speed knocked out two of the men with guns with a single fist...!  
The table got five of his enemies... he got back behind it, with most of the enemies guns taken out! Then... he used his amazing power...  
it was only possible because of his deep and metaphysical connection to the art of Shipping...  
quickly, he got out his sketching paper...  
and as they shouted at him he got absorbed totally into what he was doing...  
drawing fanart of his OTP! His OTP...  
was Rena Ryuuguu x Sekai from School Days...  
ever since he had read a certain fanfiction he had been set on a path that would lead him to darkness...  
to Plotter-hood...He finished it just as the first of the remainder of the bar-fighters flung away the table...!  
He held up the sketch...  
The sheer horror of viewing Shipping in such a pure form made their skin boil...  
and burn away...As for the others, they saw from a distance... and merely went blind...  
Yes, this plotter knew the power of shipping well...  
he walked coolly towards the bartender..."Put it on my tab,"...  
The Plotter said...The legendary scholar and intellectual superhuman, Dai Cazador, had just arrived on Rokkenjima,  
Only she had been able to understand Umineko...  
She knew that the facist pigs that ran academia would never have the needed intellectual level to understand Umineko...  
they would laugh at her when she explained that the pantlessness of the Mahou Shoujos was one of the greatest metaphors of all time,  
which demonstrated that the exposure of the lower body corresponds to the metaphysical absence of true personality.  
That is to say that the pantless girls were...  
furniture.  
To truly understand Umineko indeed may be the most amazing feat of intellectual power in this world.  
Some people...  
might never understand.  
One day, after espousing her theory on the nature of Beatrice as a commentary on the nature of the Trinity; with Beatrice herself being the Holy Ghost,  
she had walked to her office only to find a sign on the door...  
It said... "only true intellectuals allowed. No Umineko fans"...  
She had broken down the door and inside all of her Umineko products had been ransacked...  
and replaced with...  
Madoka Magica products, such as dakimakuras...  
She knew that she was no longer wanted...  
she... left without a world...  
And that was how she was exiled from the world of academia.  
So, in the end, Dai had been neglected by the idiocy and prejudice of the entirety of the staff of her University, and in particular by the caprice of that intellectual cockroach Laszlo.  
Indeed, on the published edition of her work on the origins of Shipping, she had even been been identified as a male. This was surely just another example of the lack of respect she got,  
and not the result of a retcon of any since her expulsion from academics she had resolved to take the fight to Shipping...  
personally.  
She had fought the Plotters on numerous occasions.  
After they had stolen a time machine from a group of otaku in Akiba she had stopped them from ruining the timeline.  
She had prevented them from making all buses teleportation machines to strange and frightening realms of Shipping.  
She had stopped them from turning Japan's schools into overly dramatic cesspools of drama... and murder.  
She had sought David Cage after he had escaped from their pernicious influence, and released "Beware: Two Plotters"  
Now she knew that the people of Rokkenjima were responsible for the Plotters setbacks, she knew that they would seek revenge.  
She headed down to the mansion, preparing to train the Ushiromiya family into a force...  
That might stop the powers of Shipping forever...It was a silly thing; but it was strange how affecting it had been. Aren't all the important things silly, in the end?  
They had run all around that bizarre and labyrinthine maze; past the bathroom and through all the little crevices, with the very special new editions and director's cuts;  
they had gone through the whole place over and over. The pounding in their hearts had gotten faster; they hadn't had to feel each others wrists to know that they both felt that.  
As to whether it was just the exercise ("perhaps we can cut back on our gym time this week," they had laughed later), or the panic that had caused that - who could tell and who cared?  
The important thing was that robotic voice of salvation that had called from above, and told them that, after all, it was okay in the end.  
Up until that point, anything could have happened; of that anything, no doubt a good amount had in fact already coursed through their overactive heads,  
But after all, they had found their child, gingerly leaning over the top of the counter at the front of the store, safe and sound.  
Perhaps a little of their panic might have translated into anger or annoyance, had they not seen the tears he had been holding back.  
It was a joke now; what if it hadn't been?  
Perhaps he still had a little of the child himself, because the relieved father kept wondering about that what if?  
What if it had been altogether more serious; the thought in itself was painful... but something made him continue to think about that terrible question.  
Of course, he thought, he would do anything for his son; that was an unquestionable fact; - wasn't it?  
His son was playing a game; but one thing confused him:  
"Daddy? Why is she showering?"  
The woman in the game... was doing just that? Why?  
It was surely a question with weight!  
When he was just a kid himself, Einstein asked himself what running alongside a laserbeam would be like; such a deep question from his son reminded him of that.  
And it was an... important question.  
He thought about it... He couldn't think of any good reason, really.  
He thought that if they had wanted to make a great game, they could have focused on something a little more emotional, like the relationship - he laughed inwardly, though honestly still a little uneasily, like the anxious man he was - with a son?  
A _lost_ son at that? Or something similar?  
Such a game could surely inspire a lot of feelings; and that was what so much of his son's games were missing.  
He wanted to make a game.. that could inspire that same smile on his son that had appeared when he shook his eyes, when they had found one another...  
Those tears that he had been so bravely staving off...  
had slowly run down his face.  
He had been so conscious of them before, had been able to sense every bit of moisture as it welled up; but as to the means of stopping such an embarrasing thing, though perhaps it should have been obvious, - he couldn't tell.  
All he could do was...  
muster his strength, after all.  
When he had seen them, that strength had gone entirely;  
he had gathered some other kind of strength, all at once, and...  
smiled, as the small, strange tears ran down.  
It was a smile that he kept in mind for months to come; he had always.. whenever he felt challenged...  
remembered it. Perhaps it was silly; but he imagined that some of that strength may also reside in him, "like father, like son".  
That strength... had it left him entirely?In the chapel of Rokkenjima... was the court of the Plotters...  
enshrouded by smoke machines ("We need some sort of enigma, we can't let any normal pleb see us!")... sat the monarchs.  
They commanded from on high. They had captured... some of the luminaries of culture, and put them to work as part of their dastardly schemes.  
Ryukishi07.. had been forced to write a whole story without using the term "closed room". But this wasn't the only kind of torture at their command...  
They had forced various hentai writers to...  
write strong female characters. Truly a punishment anyone could appreciate in it's astounding cruelty.  
Their demands were... extraordinary.  
They sat in their cloud, and issued them to the others as well...  
"You! Yes, you!"... a shiver went past the collective spine of all the... prisoners...  
It was the creator of the dating sim genre. Surely an even more devious fate awaited him...  
"You... you must write a story... where... the protagonist... has eyes!"  
Of course, you can't get them all.  
It wasn't entirely uncommon for one of their prisoners to simply fall dead like that, astonished at the amazing... painful sadism of the ... walked in...  
He was already of course, under their spell.  
But...  
both knew.  
They knew he wouldn't truly be theirs... until the showers cried."Sooooo... the _auteur_ walks in?! That unbelievable master of emotions, the only true game designer, who avoids all the faults of all the rest - is that you?"  
Cage... hung his head.  
"I.. am David Cage, yes".  
"No, no no!" - the anger could be felt...  
though the expression could not be seen, it was surely one of the most...  
intense disdain...  
"I thought you were the grand David Cah-gey, the king of pretentions, of idiocy and plot holes? Or was I mistaken...?  
do you claim otherwise?! You pathetic voyeristic bathroom cockroach who wouldn't know art if it cut off your hands and feet and left you helpless under a shower stream?!"  
Everyone in the chapel...  
winced.  
They all knew of the crimes of David Cage... how couldn't they know...  
They all knew what he had done, what he was responsible for... but as he curled into a bent, pathetic shape on the ground...  
they could hardly be overly harsh.  
They could see him as the person, Cage...  
even though they knew he was a monster.  
"I... yes... I am all that you... say I am."  
"Gooooood, good! When you release your game with _our_ story, and it becomes a worldwide hit, it will spread the messages about shipping all over the world... You're going to be known in every country in the world for this. Doesn't it make you happy? We've seen your fantasies, Cage! We know just how much you yearn for your precious awards?  
Tell us, should we engrave David Cage, or Cage-God, hmmmmmmm?"  
Cage... didn't even respond. His spirit was...  
broken.  
"Be aware that we could crush you like the bugs.. but why do I say "like"? You _are_ a bug, Cage! You're a cog in our wheel. Did you really imagine that you could ever break out? You have no talent... you have, then, nothing."  
Ryukishi07... spoke up,  
"Look at him! He's defeated! Can't you just let him be?"  
"Ohh!", the plotter somehow sneered through the smoke...  
"So now that he's on the ground, you're sympathetic? Trust us! If you saw him on his feet, prattling his nonsense - you'd change your tune!"  
"Perhaps, but it still wouldn't be right! You're-"  
Ryukishi07 was...  
dragged away by some of his creations...  
pantless magical girls...  
it seemed that they had been to the market district and realized...  
Cage had been deprived of his only defender.  
Like him, all the others had been broken...  
"Now! We can feast on your broken heart... Cage! Stand!"  
Cage... slowly stood, very unsteadily and slowly, like he expected some obligatary female lead character to appear and support him.  
"Do you know what we are! The Plotters! But in this case, due to your idiocy - there was very little plotting required! You simply fell into our waiting arms, so that we could crush what life remained out of you - not that much strength was required for _that_ task, of course!"  
"Now! We shall list some of your many offenses against good taste and dignity. To begin! You began Farenheit with a murder scene! This is a clear violation of pacing laws!"  
The truth was... the Plotter had very little real knowledge of the laws and skills of writing... he listed some flaws, but also some of the few virtues of Cage's work... given the paucity thereof, it was probably astounding that Cage didn't laugh out loud... still...  
he smiled.  
"What! What is this? A smile!"  
The Plotter was enraged...  
"I'll obliterate you! Here! Since we weren't able to complete our control using your fantasies, take your worst nightmare!"  
The cloud slowly rolled towards David Cage... he was far too weak to run away. All he could do was hope that the Plotter was somehow and mistaken, and that this...  
would be the end. He was tired. Tired of art, of auteurs, tired even of...He was in a street... the middle of it.  
There were no cars underneath the harsh moonlight.  
There were... so many people, enough that a child could get lost in the crowd despite his father calling his name...  
And...Quietly... they took up positions encircling him... as of yet they said nothing.  
At his feet were crude parodies of the awards he had awarded himself when he had had his fantasies about being a "Cage-God"  
Somehow he understood...this was a..  
trial...  
One of them spoke... which, he couldn't tell, the voice seemed to come from all of them at once... yet none opened their mouths...  
"David Cage... the greatest failure the gaming world has ever seen."  
He knew that... he didn't even wince. He just accepted this truth...  
"The disgusting beast that chases after shower scenes like a hyena after dead animals... to swallow whole..."  
Cage.. also deserved to suffer for that..  
After a while, individual sentences stopped coming.. there was simply a flow of hatred...  
it hit his body from any side, and all of them... he was suspended by it.  
"The worst dialogue writer since whoever did Life is Strange!" 'The most racist game developer since the team that made Ethnic Cleansing!"  
It was all certainly true...  
was there anything that was not true when it came to the failures of Cage...? He was talentless... certainly... therefore...  
he was worthless? He... looked at those awards one last time...and left them behind...  
he walked through the door. Then... a board on one of the buildings lit up... showing a video...It was a video from one of the many people who, having to prove his auteurhood, he had flagellated during one of his endless fantasies about the Cage-God...  
It was a fanfiction of one of Ryukishi07's stories... featuring him... as a sort of villain who... preyed on young women and needed to quench a lust for the shower...  
the person who made it cannot make his own comments on it... but perhaps we can gather a vague impression... based purely on the facts...  
Objectively, it was the most comedic video ever made (that was based around insulting a game developer)...  
Every joke was certainly a hit... and not just a tired reference to some dead joke about shower scenes and failures of the Game Designer...  
It included... no mercy...  
Cage was indicted as what he certainly was... a monster... because he had no talent, he was less than nothing...  
He was like a circus freak... something to point and laugh at, perhaps a curiosity... but certainly less than a real human being.  
Certainly the creator of this video, then, understood Cage so well... right?  
Or could it be that perhaps... he was closer to Cage than he liked to imagine?  
Perhaps if he had been truly confident in his own abilities... he would not have been forced to rely on the insults that had once been flung at someone else...?  
And indeed, though the crowd ate up all the jokes at Cage's expense... whenever the creator tried to express something other than nihilistic hatred... they seemed to turn away, to regard it as... lesser...  
Cage... understood something...  
Looking at the faces of one of the people around him... he saw a smile... and he wondered..  
They were right... and yet.. they were wrong...  
They had seen everything wrong with his "art"... but how had they responded?...  
That smile... reminded him...  
And at that moment.. the crowd seperated, opening a path to the doorway at the foot of one of the buildings... the one opening the door was...  
Jessica...He found himself... in the chapel again...  
Jessica was facing the Plotters...  
they had stepped down from their smoke... but he was too weak, sprawled on the ground, barely able to keep his eyes open at all, let alone focus on them..."So, Plotters, see? He was able to rescue himself... that's because you insisted on seeing only the flaws of the work - when the only thing that ever mattered...  
was the spirit behind it!  
David Cage must find a way to improve... but as long as he keeps the smile of his son in his heart... and continues to try... he is truly...  
someone to respect, even though we may not be always admire what he does.  
You couldn't understand this! You expected me to try to tell him how wrong he was, how pathetic - what you'd have done, in other words - but I understood - that is why...  
I'll win - and you'll lose.  
You will never be able to spread shipping across the world if _I_ have something to say about it!  
Jessica... had the look in her eyes that she had when she first made that promise to Krauss... no doubt she understood that thanks to her intervention in Cage's nightmare -  
it had already been first Plotter... advanced towards her... while the other moved behind...  
She had to go fast! "That's no good!" She said, as she blocked the first Plotter's punch easily and raised her bronze knuckles to his sternum;  
on her tail already was the other...Like a sonic boom, her backhand pimp-like slap knocked the other on their feet...The first had already gotten back on his feet, as if he were part robotic! As she turned towards the second, aiming to finish him, the first held her back...  
The second stood back up, getting ready to finish her off!"Please... you'll have to do better! That's no good!"  
She headbutted him back onto the floor, and turned back to the first..!She was knocked off her feet...  
The first advanced again...  
"You certainly are keen to rescue someone with no writing talent! Hahah, as if he could ever-"He..  
felt a hand on his shoulder...  
slowly he turned around."You don't need writing talent...  
to throw a punch"David Cage... had knocked the first Plotter out...  
The second opened the door... a flood of the people from Cage's dream appeared!  
One of them he now recognized... it was... Lucas Kane...  
He used his Matrix powers to fly towards Cage... inexplicably... just like his creation.. Cage had also gotten these powers!  
Above the heads of the others, he and Kane threw very weak-looking punches at each other! Cage got vaguely slapped once or twice, Kane was hit for massive damage! Kane was losing the advantage.. he flew down, and ran down the side of the building for no reason...  
he started to charge his yellow death power... - a red herring!  
Cage knew it would take several iterations of button mashing to charge up! He turned his attention to the next combatant (they were all standing in a line for him... after all.. most were videogame characters!)  
It was Shelby... using his powers, Cage read something... he read Shelby's intentions... he was going to go for the legs...!  
Cage and Shelby ran at each other, with Shelby attempting to be threatening despite being an out of shape middle-aged man!  
As they met in Mortal Kombat... Cage surprised Shelby...  
of course the plan to sweep the legs had been another red herring! His thoughts were inaccurate to what he was thinking - somehow!  
Cage blocked his uppercut - and hit Shelby's stomach - but the fat absorbed most of the hit!  
He flew back from Shelby's counterattack...then.. he had an idea...  
He went sideways - out of the path of Kane's yellow death attack from Dragon Ball Z! It hit Shelby, finishing him off... as Kane desperately tried to button mash enough to recover... David Cage... slowly went up to him...  
"Hmm. Kane...  
You've failed this QTE!"  
The sheer power of this cheesy one-liner pushed Kane back onto his feet!  
Cage finished him off... and turned to face his last deadly opponent... Ellen Page...  
She told Aiden to strangle Cage... but he focused and put some of his power into Jessica..!  
She got up and jumped into the air.. catching Aiden and preventing him from moving...  
Leaving Ellen Page alone with Cage.. just the way he liked her!  
They lashed out at each other!  
David Cage's strength was balanced out by Page's disgust at him...  
At last... he realized...  
She could only do as many actions as there were buttons to use for QTEs...  
He looked into her eyes... the player, aside from experiencing emotions... was using... a 360 controller!  
He punched with his left for A!  
His right for B!  
His right leg flew into a kick for Y!  
His left - for X!  
A headbutt followed by a knee - both triggers!  
Another two punches - the face buttons!  
And then... with the other knee - there was no way to use the Guide button to dodge!  
And finally... Page.. collapsed, her revenge unfulfilled... but she knew.. that Cage had surpassed his failures as a game designer..!  
Aiden went to nurse her back to health... leaving only... the second Plotter...  
He grabbed the body and opened a purple portal at the door, leaping out with the unconscious body of his fellow!  
And so... Jessica and Cage stood together against the reminder of the people from Cage's nightmare...  
They looked at each other... without a word...  
they worked out a plan.  
Cage took the thirteen on the left! One of them was the Indigo Child.. she had a sign saying "Plot Device - Do not Touch" on her back... Cage threw two of the others at once at her... destroying all three!  
One of the reminder was... Carla! Cage... hit the ground so hard it opened a hole that reached to the burial ground underneath... he resurrected one of the dead.  
Carla was a necrophiliac! He knew she couldn't resist - as for the others...  
there was Tyler! He offered him a loan - in return, they agreed to settle this over a b-ball game later! And then..?!  
It was...  
it was the Best Friends...  
But they weren't angry... he opened their minds and gave them the knowledge of the game he planned to make as redemption - no shower scenes, just his passion for the artform...  
it was a new Trilogy: the Dithyramb Trilogy!  
They were impressed... and left of their own accord...  
the rest of Cage's group.. fled the battlefield...  
Meanwhile!  
Jessica had taken on thirteen of her own enemies...  
One was Ethan, driven mad by his desire to shout his son's name over and over - and another was that very son!  
She grabbed the later and threw him into Ethan's mouth, finally shutting him up!  
And then... it was the Internet! It threw Two Girls, One Cup at her, but she dodged, and responded by quickly looking up meatspin, and throwing the computer moniter at them, destroying them!  
The last ten were led by William Defoe... She used telepathy to remind him that he had played a part in Beyond: Two Souls...  
He was confused and humiliated... the group... demoralized... collapsed and ran away...  
Together... Cage and Jessica...  
Stood victorious!"Thank goodness you have no sprite, David, else this would be even more crowded!"  
It was... a good farewell...  
David had spent so much time... expected so much from his actresses.. it was only natural that now... he would give a little back...  
All the proceeds of the Dithyramb Trilogy, past those needed to maintain Quantic Dream, were going to go to charities for third-world actors and actresses.  
The Dithyramb Trilogy, was of course a massive success.  
It was a lot better than Undertale (but what isn't - the narrator gets burnt at the stake)  
And...  
He felt he had to apologize...  
"It's okay! Ihihihi~"  
Battler... lightened the mood quite well...  
"In a thousand years, I haven't met anyone who had so many emotions as you, David",  
Beato... was really quite sensitive if you ignored the murder parts of her personality. "Enjoy yourself, David... But if you ever slip back into your old problems...""You're going down, Mister!"The time came for David to leave.. on a nice boat without any School Days protagonists heads on it.  
As he entered, Battler slightly edging away from the scary boat...  
they all said, in a pre-rehearsed unison:  
"See you again! Have a nice day!...  
And to you too, dear reader. Believe in soap commercials, and we shall meet again."So you admit it now, don't you...? Don't you!"  
"'YES JESSICA-SAMA, YOU DO HAVE A BOYFRIEND", the overwhelming sound of a million (or so) schoolgirls screaming out in squee drowned everything. The teachers dared not interfere for fear of reprisal from the Ushiromiya family...  
"Annnnnnnnnd? What was the other thing?'  
'AND HE IS SUGOI KAWAII!"  
"There we go!" Jessica, perhaps, had gone overboard, but while enforcing her will on her classmates, making them admit they had been wrong (when of course, they hadn't been) was probably wrong.. it was... the kind of thing we all wish we could do from time to time.  
To have been tortured by the knowledge of her teen single-tude like Jessica... no one could have escaped that entirely healthy, in other words.  
As she stood in the middle of the classroom, sorrounded by her adoring fans in the harsh lighting, (or rather, really Kanon's fans), suddenly in came a presence that would change the course of the entirety of the inter-stream story...It was David Cage... looking for his next victim?  
Beyond Two Android Shower Scenes had failed, failed dramatically; even the usual "cinematic" fans had been able to see through his stable of tricks.  
Now only one thing could save him from ruin... a good game!  
But that knowledge was alien to David Cage. To him, it was just that his unique genius had been neglected - no one could see that only he avoided the usual failures of the game designer.  
So in other words, him making better games was unlikely. It was more likely that he would simply look for a young, unsuspecting woman, and offer her everything, - fame, money, and the chance to be part of an auteur's project - but secretly, she would be nothing but a prop... for the shower scene.  
That was why he was here... scouting out the "local wildlife", as the thought expressed itself in his sinister head, filled with visions of showering nubiles.  
The lighting was a little lower in this room; more harsh; that was his doing... he had convinced the principal to lower the lighting in order that his "quick perusal of the highly talented young ladies of the school, in order to find only the most talented" could go quickly.  
Was the principal even aware of what he was doing? Was he lured astray by promises of some strange dance party? - We can never know.  
The whole room went silent as David walked in. His bald head reflected the light - _his_ light. Everyone here was... exactly as he wanted them to be. One of the girls caught his attention at once... it was... Akiko-chan. David "The Auteur" Cage walked up to Akiko... slowly, his eyes moved across her form. Everyone knew who he was, of course... excuses were made.  
"You probably just have to have the right body type for motion capture", one said; whispered, really, for no-one wanted to disrupt the inspection of this giant. While Beyond Androids was a failure, the name David Cage...  
still...  
inspired respect... fear.  
"Yes, I... I think you'll do", said Cage, in his trademark thick French accent; it sounded just a surrender... not to Germany, but to his lustful instincts foremost, and also...-to his laziness.  
In truth, he wished he could have had an Ellen Cag-Page again.  
She would...  
have..."Daviiiiid!"  
Jessica's voice was unmistakable...  
"You think you can just walk in here and take someone other than me!? You'll have to do better than that!"  
Akiko-chan, who had always in truth wanted an entrance into the industry, looked at her angrily... everyone thought that Jessica was being selfish.  
But in truth, she had.. though she had waited some time... only done what was right. Krauss was in fact... an avid gamer...  
She still remembered the promise she had made, when she had seen Krauss finish Beyond: Trash Souls..."Jessica, you're going to be the future holder of the Ushiromiya fortune... in the past, when I was immature, I said some things to Eva, I said that she should give up her dream, of being of the head of the family.  
I said... that because she was a woman, she had no chance of being afforded that chance. Kinzo was far too close-minded, I said."  
Krauss didn't often have the chance to show weakness, to allow his face to fall, but now... in front his only daughter, the future of the Ushiromiya family, but... more importantly, his family.. he allowed it. Finally... he had the strength to show the weakness that had provoked his tyranny over his siblings.  
"It was wrong, Jessica. I just wanted to make sure I kept the position, even though we both knew that Eva was the better of us both. It was... shameful. But now I can give you advice. Never let men like this try to control you. David Cage... is a monster."  
Jessica had seen the shower scenes, the way the perfidious and disgusting Ryan had been forced on Ellen Page's character: it all added up to one thing... She was nothing; she was just a prop for David Cage's ego. She was 'strong', therefore it was alright if, "just this once or twice", her destiny was determined by someone else...  
In other words, David Cage needed to pretend to respect the women - the people - he forced into the shower... to cover up just the same weakness that Krauss had given up to in the past. He had to convince himself of his own auteur-hood.  
So when Jessica had heard that Cage was recruiting in the area... she had made a promise to Krauss.. and to herself.  
"I will never let that man do what he did to Ellen Page to anyone else.. when he comes to my school... I'll offer myself up... but I won't give up! I'll show him the error of his ways!"  
The look on her face was one... of determination. It wasn't the fake, veil of smugness that Krauss had worn so often - too often. At that moment...she reminded him of Kinzo's own iron will.. but not a copy, not a soulless clone, not what he had tried to force himself to be!  
This was truly... certainly... the future of the Ushiromiya family!"So... come on, Mr. Cage. Do you think you'd find anyone who could better _destroy_ this part!?"  
In her words was a challenge... Did David sense it? Normally he would have rejected such a strong-willed actress out of hand... but..  
something in her eyes had bored into his soul.  
"Yes", said David Cage... "I think you'll be...  
ideally suited to this part.'  
Will Jessica break the cycle of shower scenes? Find out next time...David Cage walked up to the Awards Ceremony building... his future was on the line. Would the game he had made be well-received?  
Would his genius finally be appreciated?  
Would the teeming masses finally have a reason to believe in gaming...  
as an art form?  
Only he could show the way.  
Only he could... be the hero gaming needed; the auteur it _deserved_.  
He had thrown his heart and soul into this project.  
Not just the shower scenes, but every scene in which the female lead could be objectified, had gotten special attention.  
The part where she gets rescued by the male deuteragonist and -of course- repaid this handsome stud, modelled after Cage himself, with sex.  
The part where she "just happens" to fall into a pit of rapists.  
The part where she gets groped by the homeless people of the world.  
The part where... the player gets a choice to pair her off with that male lead now... or in the future.  
But not only these parts!  
Even the superfluous scenes - the ones without sex appeal - had gotten more attention this time around...  
He had approached the whole thing holistically, not giving in to his urge to just rely on shower scenes, like he had... so many times before.  
How many times had he had the script in front of him, next to his book of pictures of Ellen Page, and just... lost the will to go on?  
At times it seemed like it was probably all... just an excuse for the shower scenes... but... but...But he couldn't believe that! One shower scene or a hundred - a thousand! -, oh, whatever it took to finally make art! He would do anything to finally become The Auteur...  
Having told himself that the path of Auteur-ship was hard had allowed him to sacrifice so much of his life to writing games, to writing scenes where the hero comes back from the dead,  
to writing characters who had blackouts that were completely irrelevant to the story...  
all these things might have been laughed at had... an ordinary man written them.  
Yes, he had sacrificed much to the deity of Auteur-hood. Even... his self-respect.  
And this pain... the pain that he felt when he surrendered himself to his lust for shower scenes...  
Even he knew it was wrong, but precisely the loftiness of his goal allowed him to think that this... was just also a trial on the way to Auteur-hood  
So he was probably trapped, confined alone in a bathroom, with walls covered in dreams of success... of art...  
in other words... his dreams had caught him in a...  
cage...  
As he got closer, he saw a group of kids, the oldest... hardly could have been twelve years old..."Hello sir... I-I've heard of you... You're David Cage, aren't you? You're a household name... i mean, I haven't played any of your games..."  
"No, that's alright, child... and... what do they say about me?"  
"Some of them say that... that you're an auteur. But the others say that you're a...  
hack fraud."  
The words penetrated his heart...  
like a bullet through William Defoe's head, reuniting him with his family from across the Veil.  
"I know... I think... in the future... I'll finally be able to become a true auteur."  
"Believe in yourself sir... but also believe in the people around you. True art comes from understanding others; in loving them for who they are we can see... beyond ourselves... that's what I think"  
As she said what her English teacher had implied but not stated due to it's My Little Pony-like sentimentalism... Cage realized that he had been obsessed with himself, with the shower. How could he have created art for the world... if of all the people in the world...  
he only understood himself?"Thank you, girl..."He walked into the Building promising himself to see the actors and actresses differently from now on...  
He would give them the respect that they deserved... the respect that in the past he had reserved only for himself.  
He would have to learn to love them...  
Their flaws.  
Their positive qualities,  
their acting abilities, the little quirks of their day to day living! The way Jessica had sneakily carried her inhaler in her bag (don't ask how he knew) to avoid anyone knowing of her asthma,  
the way Ellen Page had been able to see the struggling artist inside the broken shell of David Cage, despite it all -how much he understood in this moment- and...he knew  
he knew that he would have to love everyone... contain everyone... because...  
without love... it cannot be walked in and he waited in the room outside of the presentation hall... Mat and Pat were there... they tried to hide...  
the judgement...  
but he understood now. In the past this would have made him angry but now he understood. They were only reacting in the way they should have.  
He had to let himself take all of it until he could prove himself..  
If no-one could stand to look at the old David Cage - so much for that, I'll make a new one... a _real_ auteur, not an excuse...  
No matter how it was received, the game meant nothing anymore. Only the future held promise.  
Ideas began to flow through his head so fast that he nearly missed the opening of the entrance... it was entirely possible that... he would never even need to go inside tonight.. in a way he hoped for that...  
It would have made it easier to make a clean break with his past...with Lucas Kane, with Shelby; they had all just been mutilated versions of himself. He understood that now. "And the winner is... David Cage!"  
A voice from within the chapel of gaming...He walked on stage...His steps were heavy with his thoughts, and yet with his newfound resolution he felt so...  
light.. so strong.  
In front of him were all the awards of the ceremony...  
He stood in front of the audience - in front of the world! Like an idol, like a treasure!  
The aristocracy of the consoles were there, the master race had also appeared!  
He stood in front of them, in front of _it all_ , like Michelangelo's David, or - more accurately - like The Thinker!The applause for him continued... Ben "Yahtzee" ran on stage...  
it was obvious that he was suffering from fatigue... he had come all the way from Australia, he had run across an entire state...  
just to get here, not to stand by Cage - _the_ Cage - as an equal, but just to have the chance to grovel at the feet of a living God of Gaming.  
"I... I'm sorry!" He said, with tears flowing down his cynical face... "I never understood the feelings... until..."  
The Cage-Godhead was not without mercy. He slowly...  
bent downwards, just enough so as to lower himself to the level of mere humanity...  
"I understand, Yahtzee... Ben. I understand and..."  
Yahtzee's eyes were filled with emotions... clearly he had finally been able to play Cage's games...  
"I forgive you."Ben exploded with happiness! The blood covered the audience... the Cage-God was also covered with humanity...  
He turned around, his lack of hair somehow billowing in the wind like a cape as he heroically faced the audience again...  
"Ten - no, eleven out of ten!", the IGN correspondent quoted their review!  
An explosion of voices... everyone clamored to give Cage's new game the best possible score...  
He ignored them..  
he somehow faced all the women in the hall...  
at once.  
They understood...  
In the middle of the room stood...an...  
enormous shower.  
In an dionysiac ritual not seen since the days of Ancient Greece, they all took it all off, and, each of them bending before Cage's power... stepped into the grand shower...  
The gaming community... forgot about Half Life Three. Gabe Newell made a solemm promise to diet until he also had the physique of a David Cage...  
The Last Guardian was cancelled because Cage refused to direct it...  
Without his genius storylines, every MMO was forced to close down their services... there's no time for raiding when you could be playing Beyond: Two Souls...  
The world of Let's Play's... collapsed.  
With only David Cage's games being worth watching... there was just not enough material for an entire community.  
Only one LPer remained... his true name was unknown, but reports suggested that he was called by Cage himself...  
"My super great friend"...  
The detritus of the LPIng world, like Dithyramb... died without a trace. There was no room for mediocrity in a world with Cage in it...  
The Best Friends were reduced to mere lapdogs of the Cage-God... they stood guard outside his house, forced to tell their jokes to any visitors...  
They said "it was a pleasure to serve"...  
And PewDiePie... he lost all his subscribers and died alone... the only one by his side was... his handpuppet of a brofist with a face...Cage was so happy... but something was missing... her.  
She wasn't showering...The girl... looked at the Cage... at the man, Cage... and...  
walked out of the room.  
Cage looked at his awards, and then he..  
looked at her leave him battle had taken place in his heart and his dreams for so long...  
his longing to be accepted... for his love for the shower... clashed with what he knew to be true artistic integrity...  
Why had he accepted Jessica as an actress... was it... because he knew...  
that she could end the battle inside of him?Battler had left the beach scene after a group of American tourists had accused him of being a lolicon because of his association with Lambda.  
Luckily, he had found a good anime to watch, called Gakkou Gurashi.  
It was a very cute anime about cute girls doing cute things in a cute school.  
It was cute. He had said, "Hi, Gurashi", knowing from the start that this was one of the good ones...  
But, something was coming up that would frighten Battler..."They're all zombies!""God damn it Beato, I swe-""What's wrong, Battleeer? Upset? Well, you should try thinking of a way out of a clos-""Beato, how do you even know... what the endings of all this season's anime are?""Well... Witch.. you, I mean...""Really, because judging from the noises I'm heard from that VIP room..."Beato... braced for the horrifying conclusion..."You've watched every anime this season!""It's my... secret shame. Battler, don't tell Bern or Lambda, I'd be a laughing stock at the next WitchCon, and-""Hey Battler, Beato, I need to help refine my strategies for a good old fashioned verbal battle, and since my parents are gone for today, I thought I'd try the other old married couple.""Suuure, Jessica, but first... you'll have to try to solve one of my feared closed rooms, its horrors refined over the course of a thousand-!""Enough, Beato... I have to help my family... and if, at the end of the tunnel, there's a rub, well-""H-hey, Beato"  
"What did I say about that, Battleeer?!"  
"AHEM".  
They... slowly, shamefully turned to face Jessica again..."So, here's the plan, I'll keep the script hidden right up until we enter the motion capture room for the shower scene... then I face him directly, and, it'll be like this:""D-david! I don't think this shower scene is a good idea...  
"Hmm... in fact... this whole time, you've been keeping the plot under wraps. It was as if you were... hiding something. So I turned over the chessboard!  
It was something my cousin Battler told me about, though he left out the part where his mother had to explain what it meant!  
If you were hiding the plot, you would have to have a reason... because without an idea of what each scene means, the actor can't bring their all to the role!  
And so, this means... that you were either intentionally harming the game by withholding infomation, or..."There is no script, there is no greater plan! The chessboard shows as much! So I had a look, and what did I see!? One very lovingly described shower scene!  
Yes, and the every move of the camera, its "Gentle exploration of her lower body, the camera moving almost imperceptively like an expert French game developer lover"!  
I saw it all! And what else?! Nothing else, it was just the shower scene and a bunch of doodles and a few directions to "improvise some shit about suicide reuniting families"!  
How could you?! We thought you were an auteur!"So, something like that.. but I'm not sure if that's the best finishing blow.. what do you think?""It's good, but it's missing a certain something... it needs more of a point, I think. Let me demonstrate...""Soo, Mister Cage, if you haven't got anything but a shower scene and some notes...""How could you ever call yourself an auteur! You're a fraud... If you got drowned under the weight of heavy rain, would anyone shed a single tear? No, they wouldn't.  
Everything you've done has been weakness... you've relied on secretive ancient societies, murderers who kill because of daddy issues, and bizarre intrepretations on the life of native Americans... why?  
Because you're weak! Because, in your own heart...  
you know...  
that you can't write a good story -  
to save your auteur status!  
Yes, you certainly rely a great deal on crutches for someone who so likes to boast about how far your writing can carry us, into the realms of emotion, the swamps of feeling, the mountains of sentiment, the-  
Well, I think you get the idea!  
In other words... the Best Friends were right from the start...though they mocked you endlessly, they also...  
understood every flaw of your work... of course, it was hard to remember all of them... their conclusion was correct; though some tried to deny it, to play the "Cinematic" card!  
you're a hack fraud! Those crutches were all failures of the game designer! It was always foolishness to think that the way to unlock the unique potential of games was to make them more like films!  
You're a-""Jessica, I hope you realize that while proving your opponent wrong is fun - if, sometimes, unchallenging, Battler, - it.. isn't always everything.  
When you face him... you will face a man who has looked down from the cliffs of Despair, and seen only shower scenes at the bottom.  
If you prove that someone is doing something wrong, and that alone, you have left them in a bad place, but you've also locked the door. For, if you prove his entire life's work was a failure... how can he accept that...?  
You need to provide the key to that room, a way out, a way to go from shower scenes to true art, but more than that, you need a reason... David Cage has been trapped there for so long that... it seems like the whole world could be brought into that little room!  
He could bring in Ellen Page, Mayans, the homeless.. he doesn't yet realize that until he leaves to see them himself, as long as he brings them to him... they are ruined.  
In other words, it isn't enough to say he is wrong... that isn't even needed... what is needed is to show what is right - and to demonstrate why we should all strive for that... - and for that, you will need to understand David Cage.. because...  
without love, it cann-""Yeah, yeah, Beato. Tell me, do witches have to shower?"  
"Of course, immense power is no substitute for proper hygiene"  
In the back of the rose garden, Natsuhi and Krauss were returning from a business meeting... Krauss had detoured on the way, joining a group of gaming purists who had been burning a pile of Quantic Dream games...  
he had inhaled a few (fume?) too many fumes, and Jessica and Battler went off to help him recover, leaving Beatrice... it seemed...  
alone."Well... I hope you did at least as well on your own end", she said, as another witch approached..."I think I set him further on the right path... his elaborate fantasies grow ever more bizarre and overwrought... the first signs that he is beginning to reject them. They heighten themselves in self-defense, dilate themselves until they burst...  
and yet..  
You sense it too, don't you? The... Devious Plotters, even now, plot against us.. if they influence him too much..."Do not worry about that... I think that Jessica is up to it."  
"I... hope you're right... for we both know that only David Cage holds the key...  
To truly defeat the forces of shipping"  
And in the room in the mansion, the part where Krauss ever the devoted gamer, had put the game development studio (it was previously established that he's a gamer so of course this shouldn't be surprising, though Kinzo was pretty upset...)...  
The Plotters walked in to where David Cage was struggling... he had just woken up from his dreams...There, as he stood at the most decisive point of his life... where there was a chance, just for a moment for him to...  
recover what had been the spark that had fuelled a whole life full of effort, that had given a simple French boy the courage and confidence to throw his stories to the world...  
to the wolves, to the Best Friends, to everyone...  
In came the Plotters...  
As they seduced him with their honeyed words, the truths that he had been so close to grasping, that had laid so close to his hands for the first time in his life since Farenheit!..  
Slowly... were pushed back into the abyss...  
The Plotters, with practised motions, eased him back into the comfortable lies that had smoothed his path from earnest game developer to freakish, pretentious hack...  
and...  
Now it was clear that...  
David Cage could not do this alone... He retreated back into his pathetic adolescent fantasies about the Cage-God, about awards... about showers... and sank into a darkness from which...  
there was probably no escape for him now...he witches join forces to aid Jessica in her goal of redeeming David Cage... but can they beat the Devious Plotters in this? "Amazing," said the first of the two Devious Plotters (this term is copyrighted, so don't even think about it).  
"Yes, we have the ominous techno music and there's been not even a single death yet. This bodes well for our devious plot."  
"Ugh... what plot is that?", the first of the wholly competent plotters said, their gender-neutral-so-as-to-avoid-spoilers face showing some considerable confusion.  
"The same plot we always try... take over the world, and force every character into pairings for our shipping pleasure! Muhahaha!"Tune in after the next Umineko stream for the thrilling continuation of this strange subplot... if you dare. "Oh! Hi, I'm just taking the train to Rokkenjima (isn't that an island?) and I was wondering what to do for fun!I sure saw a lot of scenes of Battler and Kanon-kun being together in that last episode - it was kyute!""Did someone say kyute!? Hao..."  
"I sure did, Rena-chan!.. but, you know what else is very, very kyute?"  
"Kyute?! Where?!"  
The very, very sinful pantless magical girl advanced towards the blushing redhead..."H-hey, Sin-chan, don't touch me there! It's embarassing - and we're both girls!""Shush, child... just let the yuri-ness take you by the hand... and not only the hand..."Smiling, Sin-chan slowly nudged Rena's lithe body towards the wall of the very strangely empty train. Rena blushed as she felt  
Sin-chan's pantless leg slowly lodge itself in between - in betwixt - her own. She wished she had her dress on, the one with the slit  
that went up the middle for no reason. And when the kiss came it was only natural for-The first mention of Rokkenjima in the historical record is a matter of debate. K. Ushiromiya of the Patriachy University steadfastly maintains that it is in fact the island mentioned in relation to "Beatrice", the famous Portuguese woman explorer who never returned from her expedition to Japan, the Emperor of which sent a ship to find her; finding the island instead.  
But the consensus opinion across academia is that this island is in fact not Rokkenjima at all; but rather, the nearby Moe island, well-known for being the place where the first manga was created. My friend at the University also maintains that in relation to the aforementioned K. Ushiromiya "the consensus opinion is that he's a nutcase"; but we cannot rely on hearsay when it comes to important historical work.  
Regardless, the Japanese rule over Rokkenjima began after the failed invasion of Korea by the warlord Nobunaga, the peace talks for which occasioned the official designation of each minor island into their Japanese, Chinese, and Korean spheres of influence.  
But the island itself was of course not used until the famous occasion of the exile of the poet and satirist Akechi Hidetada.  
Akechi was one of the foremost court poets of the first half of the eighteen-hundreds in Japan, and the cultural critic Miyawashi Tokagawa reports that his songs "were on the lips of everyone... from the lowliest plebeians to the highest official's courtesans"; being unable or perhaps unwilling to make a show of killing such a well-loved individual; they had him removed to this remote island.  
This was a truly cruel-hearted act by the Emperor, which contemporary facists like Professor Laszlo would fain match. A small house, right next to the second mansion that today stands there, was there for his benefit. By boat came supplies; aside from the captains of these ships, therefore, Akechi was alone. In his notes can be found, (if one looks, of course~!) his notes on this time,  
or rather, this grouping of times that the cultural elite wants us to believe comprises "time":  
"I was free, like a bird that has been disowned by its flock. Being ruled by no passions any longer, but by precisely by that placid harmony that I had feared, the production of my art became more and more difficult.  
Normally words came overflowing for me; now I had to tilt the cup so far that I had to lean backwards to catch them; a most disagreeable situation, as I have a stiff neck. But by degrees, and thanks to my love of irony, I found a solution  
. It came, I believe, as I explored a neaby cave. It was so dark that I was reminded of my soul. I came to realize that, having been exiled for the possibility of spreading dangerous ideas,  
it was now the right time or perhaps indeed the only time to create such ideas out of nothing. I created an artform over months of careful work... it was glorious to create an art so opposed to the nature of art. I created a disease, an ineradicable tumour that would stealthily approach my readers, and... crawl up their backs... it was some time..."  
This, then, is the well-known creation of "Shipping", which today stands in such a strong position in our culture. It was only discovered, of course, when a Japanese soldier, stationed in Rokkenjima during the Second World War, discovered the manuscript for the very first Shipping story.  
He took it home, out of malice or out of the influence of some sort of corruption - for so many are caused by exposure to Shipping - and in a year, half of the doujin manga in the country contained some form of Shipping.  
In another, it had begun to spread it's tendrils in the United States and other Western nations.  
By itself it caused perhaps 6% of deaths any given year; combined with the invention of "Fandom", it soon became the Black Death of the twentieth century. Just like the people in my faculty, its tentacles soon covered everything, penetrating every last bastion of intellectual honesty. By the start of the 2000s, it loomed over the world like a comet's shadow over a future crater; but of course, there was no way to run away from it, and...  
-Excerpt from the first draft of "The History of The Great Disease - Shipping from Rokkenjima Onwards", found on the desk of the scholar and well-known neurotic, Dai Cazadore, after his removal by the highly distinguished and capable head of staff, Laszlo Dir. And today, On the Umineko After-Stream Show, A Very Special Episode...This is Battler Ushiromiya. He was just a normal adolescent, like you. But one day, after a hard day's work of searching for that illusive white horse, he settled down to watch an episode of his favourite anime, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. Over time, Battler had grown attached to this particular anime's cast of characters, but to one in particular, one "Rena Ryuugu" (Var. Reina Ryuguu), he felt a strange feeling that he slowly realized could be compared to... love.  
As a consequence of the shipping of her in the fandom, he was corrupted... Now, Battler has not experienced that glorious feeling of being in love, which you can if you obey your parents. This is a problem that many anime viewers face, of course, but for Battler it caused no small amount of distress. Many of the women in his life were discomforted by his tendencies towards sexual harrasment, for some reason or another, and it became more and more difficult for Battler to experience fulfilling, challenging relationshipOver time, therefore, Battler became more and more reliant on his "relationship" with Rena Ryuugu, who he called his "waifu", and his drug deal- anime producers, Studio DEEN, demanded more and more money from him, to pay for his dakis and his anime and his image songs...  
He became detached from his family and friends, spending time only with these material goods, trying to escape the harsh 3D day, his cousin Jessica staged an intervention. It took the murder of his entire family, but he was able to form a connection with one "Beatrice" (Var. BEAAAATOOORICCHE), and in the end, that's what really matters.  
Battler escaped, but not everyone can. For your own sake, please, -  
don't do waifu.  
Shipping...  
is evil.  
(This message was sponsored by Mums Against Anime founded in 1999 to keep our kids safe and kid ourselves that we keep them safe.)Gohda was putting the finishing touches on what was probably his finest dinner yet. Indeed, his one goal in life was to pursue the arts of cooking to ever higher levels.  
So when he had been offered the new seasoning by the new owner of his favourite shop he couldn't wait to try it out in his next meal.  
Perhaps one could say he had even gone overboard. Everyone's meal would contain some of "Gohda's Magic Sugar".He smiled as he imagined how this might get the Ushiromiya's attentions. This was one of the very few times when the whole family was here on the island, excepting the family conferences...  
But those, of course, were often accompanied by harsh recriminations and accusations, or, before Kinzo had been stricken ill, by his denigration of his children.  
Every time, Gohda had spent a good half-month or so testing out recipes, collecting obscure ingredients, spending out of his own pocket to make it the best meal so far...  
But they had neglected the food, preferring to fill their mouths with insults and the most undignified statements.  
Of course, Gohda couldn't complain; this was good employment. The Ushiromiya's were familiar with good food and provided him with money, space, and good feedback on his work.  
He tried therefore not to be too angry when his services were wasted. After all, he did this as a passion as much as a job. But this time, it would certainly be different!  
He smiled again; this time, since this dinner was only to celebrate David Cage's victory over the Plotters, and with the famliy conference coming up, there was unlikely to be much conflict over money.  
Krauss and Natsuhi were proud of Jessica too, therefore happy, and Gohda hoped that Natsuhi wouldn't let Eva's hostility get to her, if it did appear. Even her headaches had calmed down recently, after all.  
And therefore...  
Gohda, thinking this might be one of his few chances to really get to see appreciation for his work, had thrown himself into it...  
He was hoping that with "Gohda's Magic Sugar", they would just die with excitement and anticpation, feeding in to the joy of discovering a whole new taste.  
That was the hope, anyway."Ah! Shannon-chan, Genji-san! I was hoping you might come!"  
Gohda knew that Shannon could resent the way that he would assume certain privileges over her, who had been a servant for so long,  
and therefore he decided, since he knew that this would be his masterpiece, to give her, and Genji as well, a small treat.  
He had prepared a small meal, just a snack really, just for the two of them to try out. Kanon was dealing with the guesthouse, but he expected Shannon might get some to him as well; Kumasawa wasn't present for this meeting."Ah! Gohda..."  
She was surprised by the two plates he deftly handed them.  
"Is this for us?""A-ah, I mean, Genji, is it proper for... us to..?""Gohda has prepared a dinner for the family... it would be unseemly for us servants to partake of that meal...""But, this is, after all, a seperate meal, isn't it? Therefore, it would certainly be in keeping with dignity for us to eat."  
Genji's semantics were unneccesary but provided the semblance of authority that Shannon had been looking for. Both, though perhaps it was less obvious in Genji's case, were excited by the chance to try this out even before the family.  
After all, it was rare to see Gohda in such good spirits."Well then!"  
Shannon hadn't eaten all day on account of the preperations for the arrival of the other family members, and being the one to help escort them around.  
Genji had also been deprived due to Kumasawa's absence.  
Therefore, they dug in... .. and by digging in, they prepared their graves.  
The "Magic Sugar" was of course the Plotter's poison.  
Within twenty minutes or so of this ingestion, the poison would begin to act...  
It would begin with a certain tightness of the throat.  
Air would still not exactly refuse to be drawn in, but would seem to object, tightening the neck as if protesting as one breathed...  
Perhaps this alone, though it started subtly, would be enough to cause some panic... but...  
by the time this sympton manifested, the coughing would begin.  
A hacking cough, light and occasional at first, but soon developing into a heavy one, further increasing the difficulty of breath...  
From the start, a headache would also develop, getting worse and worse...  
as one held up one's hand to the head, they would notice the pain that now accompanied moving the limbs... soon that pain would extend to all movement...  
five minutes from the beginning, even if they could take breath and master the coughs, just this pain would make standing up next to impossible...  
Probably, they would stay sat down, until breathing went from difficult to outright impossible, and they would...  
slump down in their chairs...Battler and Jessica were the last to make it to the banquet.  
As they sat down, Shannon and Gohda laid out the dinner for all of the family."Ah! I was wonderin' when you two'd come! Krauss was worryin' 'bout you delaying our meal!"  
Hideyoshi was in a good mood as usual...  
Probably, thought Jessica, it was due to not having to keep Eva's fangs out of Krauss and Natushi. She'd seen that depressing farce at multiple conferences after something strange happened...Battler slowly pulled out a laptop from his inexhaustibly large pockets, within which he kept his cheatsheet of closed rooms solutions (don't tell Beatrice).  
And... there was not...  
Battler's normal carefree expression. He looked in that moment, Jessica was thinking, rather like her own parents had looked like when she was younger,  
when she had hidden outside the dining room to listen to the parents' conversation... they had come out totally winded, and they had forced her to bed in fits of anger,  
snapping at the moment of eye contact like a cliff-climbers rope -...  
Battler's expression was dominated by that sense of tiredness and tension.  
"Jessica... have you checked recently?"hat was... an odd question. They had, like all responsible young adults, often discussed the various literary merits of the fanfictions of their favourite fiction works...  
indeed, who hasn't sometimes said - "I cried when the author shipped my waifu with Makoto from School Days"?  
But that's not important, just like fanfiction itself isn't important. What was important was the strangeness of this question."I... don't get it, Battler..."  
And the whole family by now was glancing sideways at Battler, trying to guess at what was going on to drive this immature man to such...  
desperation..."Just... take a look at this..."  
He put the laptop down. He put his hand, which had been holding it, back into the air, as if still trying to delay... this terrible moment.  
This tragedy.  
And... he clicked on the Umineko/Cross-over section...  
and... he clicked on the "pairings" button...  
and... then...  
he selected the "Jessica Ushiromiya" character...  
And then...  
the top result... was...  
David Cage...Jessica... died a little on the inside...  
what right did they have to do this to her, and to Cage.  
To deny them the chance to decide their own fates...  
To ship is surely the worst fate of all.  
For when we ship, we create a universe.  
And in this universe, we create our characters...  
but it would be wrong to say "a" universe...  
for inside our characters are also universes.  
They too have hopes and dreams, and sexual preferences.  
So when we force our own views onto them, when we ship...  
we commit a sin worse even than rubbing...  
Battler understood the pain that would be caused to his cousin, and to the redemned David Cage...  
That was why he gave them a chance to make it right. And to fight the evil scourge of shipping.  
For when we ship, we do not only force our weakness onto our characters, but we also...  
avoid facing it ourselves.  
Every moment spent shipping is a moment we have failed at changing our lives, at making ourselves something worthwhile.  
And...  
If you ship too much, you may never find a ship in real life.  
And that would be terrible, wouldn't it?"Uh... Now! This is one of my more surprising delicacies! In fact, I was surprised myself... ah! The finest cuts of meat, accompanied by the vintage wine from..."  
Gohda was going to continue, but...But everything changed in a moment.  
In the offices of JAST USA, was a single man... a single hero.  
He was sitting at his computer... sweet... was raining down his forehead...  
In his bloodshot eyes... the ghost of determination past...  
it was as if his soul had died in front of this computer, muscle memory alone kept his fingers  
gingerly scrapping against the keys, continually pushing forward out of a sort of back and forth inertia.  
But... what he feared.. still happened.  
Behind him... _he_ walked up...  
And in his eyes there was not even that remnant of humanity...  
but only devotion to his new mistress...  
only loyalty to the Great WAS SUPER SONICOSomehow, the JAST team had become prey to her... to...  
WHAT SHE REPRESENTED.  
Decay. Disgusting subhumanity, subordinated to the LOWER impulses, the bestial primate instincts.  
What? What had happened to the days of old, to releases of quality like Steins;Gate? Why had this-Oh my.  
Sorry about that.  
It seems, the author, quite justifiably,  
got angry at certain of JAST USA's business choices.  
Tune in next time for more of your regularly scheduled Umineko fanfiction."The first victim of the Shipping epidemic in Japan was a young teenage consumer of shoujo doujins. The girl bought one of the first pirated editions of the very first Shipping manga to be produced.  
Probably, she had no idea that what she held in her hands... would one day destroy entire countries, infect entire cultures and bring them to the insectoid level we associate with the victims of Shipping,  
who are called "weaboos".  
Her story, much like that of the few honest people left alive today in an academic world that has resisted the intellectual light of Umineko, is a story of misunderstandings.  
In that way, it is much like some of the Shipping manga that has been produced. This is the irony that us survivors must confront on our own terms.  
Within a week of her first reading, she began to display the signs of incurable Shipping infection. Today she'd be restrained and placed in a cell, where she'd recover, and perhaps find yuri love with the other inmates.  
Alas: fate had a harsher, less pure fate in mind for her.  
As a consequence of the infection, she had written a "Friendfiction", involving a romance between two of her "real life" friends.  
In her corrupted state of mind, she had probably thought that this amounted to an act of friendship; that's the consensus...  
No, that is definitely what happened...  
but...  
They... found out.  
In her diary, that girl wrote:  
"Today, father woke me up early. I didn't know what was going on. He.. pulled out my friendfiction... and said that... I had brought shame to my family.  
I didn't know what to do. He explained to me...  
the pain I had put my friends through.  
The power of friendship had... made my friendfiction into a poison that had destroyed their very hearts...  
I..."  
And soon after, she died.  
The girl who had wanted only to show her friends her love for them died.  
That is what Shipping does...  
And that is why.. I must fight the two most powerful harbingers of Shipping alive today..  
why I must stop the Plotters at the cost of even my life - no, that my life is forfeit from the moment I fight against them is what makes this worthwhile.  
For it is worse to surrender for a moment, and to accept the pairings of madmen, of fandoms, than it is to die fighting that monstrosity...  
a life without shipping is the only life worth living."  
From the final papers of Dai Cazador ruminated on her rejection from the academic world as she walked towards the Rokkenjimam mansion...  
And even the wolves of the island, even the gremlins, who normally lived only in TV sets, and even the owls that may have normally been in Russian pioneer camps,  
and even the young witches who might have been falling off cliffs, and even her own troubled heart:  
all of them knew that she represented the only chance to save the Ushriomiyas... and perhaps the only chance to stop the onslaught:  
to stop the Plotters, and perhaps even Shipping itself...  
And still, as they joined in a line behind her, determined to end the plague of poorly written fanfiction that President Trump had only barely managed to keep in check with his wall (which weaboos paid for),  
she remembered.  
Laszlo and the rest had called her "Crazy"; they had said Shipping could never be stopped, that once it had started it's assault... the bullying of good taste, and the demise of humanity, was probably assured.  
Probably, being intellectuals after all, they might have used a more dignified term than "crazy"; that was probably just poor word choice on the poor author's part; an author who couldn't even think of synonyms for "poor".  
But all that probably didn't matter. After all, it was a battle to the death. To die in battle against such an overwhelming force as Shipping was an honourable death.  
The wolves barked... they were coming up to the entrance to the mansion... there was no telling what was going on in there: perhaps the Ushiromiyas had already been poisoned. "To... think _ahck_ that you would stoop to such levels as this! You... monsters!"" _ACK_ We've been... poisoned to..o... can't you..."The chaos inside the mansions dining hall was almost comical. The tensions between the parents, which they had assumed would finally be quieted for at least a single day of peace,  
had instead been ignited into a furious, but flickering fire. With their dying breaths, they could think of nothing more meaningfull than asinine accusations; lacking any obvious culprit, with all being affected,  
they had simply abandoned all attempts at reasoning and thrown their last feeble gasps of vitality like wood on to the conflagration...  
Jessica, ignoring the pain, draped herself across table in an attempt to reach Eva; whether or not the latter even noticed was another matter entirely. She still had some serious words for Krauss and Natsuhi; Hideyoshi attempted to calm Jessica down, but couldn't force any more than pathetic coughs out."H..old on... have we confirmed that... this poison... really exists!?"  
Battler hoped that if he somehow got the poison in a box, it would cease to totally exist, and would instead partially exist; because it would stop being observed.  
That's just science...  
But... how could he know where Gohda had stored whatever fatal ingredients were to blame...? And getting there was also another matter entirely!..  
It looked like the last members of the Ushiromiya family would die as they lived: blaming each other for their was someone they'd never seen before... and moreover; someone in a totally different art style!  
It was well known that under the laws of the Anime Act of 1999, that anime girls drawn in a different style from one in harm had to help the latter...  
this had been drawn up in order to prevent one art style harming the others and therefore establishing dominance!  
Of course, it wasn't as if Dai had any intention of not helping.  
She got some of the wolves to stand up bipedally and use their paws to maintain everyone's positions still, to elongate their remaning time on Earth.  
Some, like Battler, didn't believe that wolves even existed on Rokkenjima, but there they were.  
He gasped out... On the ground, struggling to continue on, were the servants Shannon, Gohda, and Genji. Dai didn't notice the weak sounds they made;  
she quickly worked out that the box with "Gohda's Magic Sugar" poorly scrawled across it was probably the poison.  
And with her experience from the forensics involved in her scrape with the Plotters when they had murdered her parents in her dark anime past,  
she knew that this poison was of the sort that grew hard and got lodged in the body after consumption...  
but there wasn't enough for her to trace the poison back to it's point of origin.  
And she looked towards some occult looking stakes that had been left on the table..."What's going on here? Those were pieces of _steak_ , not stakes!"  
Dai would have none of that. These characters were needed for plot progression after all.  
"Oh really? If you don't cooperate... I may have to allow the Plotters to portray you as... "well-done" in the next NSFW Umineko doujin manga...""Let's not get hasty here! This is a pure fanfic, after all. We'll help. What do you need?"  
She told them to go into stake form and scrap out the solidified poison from the bodies. thereby saving them and allowing her to analyse more of the poison...  
"Hey! What do you think we are? Slaves?!"  
"No; furniture".  
Shannon vaguely nodded her head from the ground...  
"Oh, okay. But you know, it doesn't really seem like this would work".  
That was true. It may have been something the author had just made up on the spot to make sure the plot kept moving...So slowly, the stakes cleared out everyone's poison before they died...  
Dai examined the poison, and was able to use various undefined means to somehow figure out where it was made, and therefore where the plotters were hiding out...  
she was about to leave when... Battler and the rest... stopped her..."Wait, you... we want to help you stop the Plotters once and for all..."  
She.. turned towards them...  
"Are you ready to lay down your lives in order to defeat the forces of Shipping...?""Then... follow me. The road to freedom, to liberation of our hearts, from the scourge Shipping... no one can anticipate where we might be forced to go, what lengths we may have to go to...  
but if we stand together...  
we have a chance...  
a chance to stop the Plotters.  
A chance to stop Shipping...  
A chance...  
To save the world..."  
They had thought her "crazy".  
They'd given up on fighting.  
But she'd never given up.  
Inside of her heart, the love for Umineko kept her intellectual distance from Shipping.  
Only she could truly see it for the evil it was...  
and only she could stop it...!  
The Plotters didn't know that they had failed, that their arch-nemesis had gathered up theh entire Ushiromiya family and was now ready...  
to strike...  
Could they ever hope to defeat the Plotters?  
Without them, the stream of Shipping fanfictions would slowly die out.  
It was the only hope...  
It couldn't be helped. The Plotters.. had to be Tokyo skyline was lit up... but across the country, no...  
across the world, a terrible disease was spreading...  
No one could explain the spread of Shipping even when it was merely a contamination within the media of the otaku community, but this was truly something else.  
In the few days since Dai had left for Rokkenjima, it was like the corruption had seeped out from the manga and anime of the country...  
Just like the tentacles in those Japanese manga and anime, the thoughts of shipping that slowly the people of Japan had built a resistance to...  
rapaciously ravaged the most innocent corners of their minds... penetrated their tender flesh...  
No one could sleep without dreaming of strange shipping scernarios... some had experienced merely frightening ones, like yuri with male characters, but...  
but others had closed their eyes only to see their male friends, brothers, fathers, even husbands... with strange... protuberances...springing, basely hanging, from their chests...  
Yes, even... mpreg had been inseminated into what had been pure hearts...  
And even when people blinked, they saw flashes of strange things.  
Rena x Sekai? That was only the beginning.  
People saw Battler x Sakutaro, Maria x Okabe,  
Christina x Daru, Mayuri x Hitler, and even more bizarre pairings...  
The constant torture had reduced the population to mere... zombies...  
and across the oceans... it was spreading.  
In Australia, Darwin had already reported the first instances, and it seemed to be moving downwards, and Hawaii and other Pacific Islands had also been afflicted...  
Only Dai and the Ushiromiya family had enough sanity left to try to stop this; and Dai herself, though she was an ultra-intellectual... knew she could only resist for so long...  
As she moved through the silent crowds, watching the listless men and women of Japan stumble, with dead eyes... in which, if you looked long enough... you could see the... pain  
the pain of their waifus being shipped with lolis, with real life politicians, and even... OCs...  
She knew that this had to stop. It had gone too far. Shipping had been under control...  
They were unable to find their ways to work. The public transport system had collapsed, and no one had the presence of mind to drive their own cars.  
They merely, desperately, shambled like the walking dead, across plazas and parks, across empty streets; though, of course, not being barbarians, none-the-less they looked both ways before crossing...  
Society could not last like that.  
And the cause...  
Dai looked up...  
There was a single, strange building...  
at the edges of the roof, and spreading like lazy cuts downward, were strange erosions of the building, gaping holes through which one could see the servants of the Plotters...  
it was like the sky truly had been scraping against it, eroding it, like water lashing against the rocks; but...  
this was just another side-effect of the increasing power of shipping.  
It crashed against the building just like it...  
crashed against the human spirit, despoiling it, weakening it... reducing it to nothing.  
So it was in some ways, the opposite of Umineko, which shows us the way to ever higher levels of intellectual ability.  
And the most horrific impact of all was yet to come.  
As Dai walked down a back alleyway, she saw... two people who looked quite familar.  
It was two popular anime characters... kissing.  
The sheer power of the onslaught had destroyed the very fabric of reality...  
manifestations of the shipping dreams had begun to appear even...  
in the real world.  
But...  
Those fabrics had contained not only shipping; forms of anime such as mecha had also begun to appear...  
But this didn't mean the end.  
For this itself handed Dai and the Ushiromiya family a weapon.  
A weapon not bound by society, by common sense; but only by the imagination.  
A weapon that had been... mocked, considered pathetic before.  
Chunnibyou.  
In Dai's hands was... Gungnir.  
She walked into the building's course, inside were the guards of the Plotters.  
They had been fitted with anti-shipping equipment to help keep them sane enough to keep watch.  
This equipment was the written scripts for long shitposts that they posted online, on MyAnimeList, complaining about the sudden surge in shipping...  
By doing this, they were able to refute Shipping; but this meant that at any one time, only two of the guards were on duty, with the others having their daily shitposts...But... they were dazed... because the scripts had been replaced...rauss had used his pull in the business world to get inside the building, and had sneakily made his way to the computers that stored the scripts..."Hey, you! Who are you and what are you doing here?"  
Krauss knew the importance of what he was doing...  
He didn't have time for this kind of nonsense!  
He remembered one of his idols in the business world, who had built a fortune, and eventually...  
had become leader of the free world!  
And slowly... he felt that confidence fill him up, like an all-you-can-eat buffet of delegates in an election primary."What am I doing here...?"  
The guard cautiously kept his distance, feeling for his gun...  
"What are you doing here! The whole world is falling apart and you do nothing!?"  
"W-well, I'm getting pai-""Pft! You think  
that's  
enough? You have to work hard! Here!"  
Krauss handed him a brochure of some description... he held his hand out, the gun forgotten...  
It was a... project...  
A wall across the entirety of the coast of Japan...?  
It would...-  
Protect them from filthy gaijin!  
Never again would their precious lolis be defiled by those dirty Western influences!  
"Yes-but, I already have this job, and...""No need to worry, friend. You're fired. Now, go get this new job, with me, and together..."  
"We'll make Japan great again!"  
"That's righ-"  
He was already gone. Such was the magnetic pull of that magnificent plan to save Japan - to save Nippon.  
It was truly glorious; and the ruse had been a success. Krauss went to the computers, and found the latest shitposts for them to post...  
he replaced them with a prayer to the power of Shipping...  
"I was always a lonely child; a pathetic child, with no friends, no life. But... I found Shipping. Finally, I was able to bring fictional characters down to my subhuman level.  
Never had I been so happy; never had I been able to express myself by writing bad stories about other people's characters!"  
It went on like this for some time.  
Krauss... had done his part, and was prepared to leave... when more guards came..."Whadya doing!"  
Krauss had gotten away from the computers, so his subterfuge would not be discovered.  
All he had to do...  
was escape...  
Easy enough. He backed up to the window, drew his gun from his jacket...  
"Hey... give the Plotters a message from me..."  
He smiled  
"Tell them...  
they've been trumped."  
He jumped out.  
The sheer momentum of that election campaign was in his heart.  
It broke his fall. But all that would have been for naught had... had the Plotters been able to recruit as they been trying...  
suspecting that the Ushiromiyas may have survived, they had organised a meeting.  
To capitalize on the loss of jobs that had accompanied the surge in Shipping fantasies, they had set up a rally...  
they claimed that they could offer easy jobs to anyone there, at good pay...st work for Original Character Creations Limited! We offer 1000 yen (1 USD cent) per hour of work!"...  
"Hmm"  
The spokesman... stared at a person at the end of the crowd...  
slowly, the rest also turned to look at her... and the person she had with her...  
"Could it be?.."  
"My god... it's... him"Standing there was Jessica...  
and next to her...  
shrouded in mystery, as if he was spriteless  
was...-The Auteur-  
He... slowly pressed a button.  
And the building behind him showed an enormous trailer...  
for a new game... the third in the Dithyramb Trilogy, co-produced by Valve...  
And at the end, it said..-motion capture for homeless men required. Please see David Cage to apply-  
The chance to work with Cage, after the massive succeses of the first two games of the Trilogy..  
far outstripped their desire to work with the unknown Original Character Creations...  
"Nice work, Cage", said Jessica.  
David just... slowly smiled...  
this was just another step on the long road to redemption. ow, here, at the very heart of the Plotters operation...  
they were weakened...Dai threw Gungnir, impaling one of the rushed in...He rushed towards Dai-ignoring the second guard!  
And that second guard... stuck out his foot...That second guard... took off his disguise..."Hiihii! Normally it's the women who are falling for me!"  
"Battler..."  
"Oh, right; I'm a mystery protagonist, not a harem one."  
At that moment, more guards came out,...  
but something was wrong with collapsed in front of the two of them. And from behind came a third person...He had perfected the poison's formula!  
And had sneakily applied to the position of head chef, under an assumed name.  
This was the best way to prove himself after failing them once.  
"Good work, Gohda. They didn't see it coming... not a surprise considering it was in their stomachs."  
"Thank you, Battler-sama!"  
Dai picked up Gungnir; it was a gift from Virgilia.  
It wouldn't do to get it damaged.  
And slowly, the rest of the Ushiromiya family filtered in. ogether they made their way to the elevator.  
Dai... punched the roof of it so hard it went all the way up to the top floor.  
And then... they got out. The Plotters... faced did you do all this! You could have used your powers of creation to produce art, to have helped and benefited people!  
Instead, you've created a monster! You've put the whole world into a state from which it may never recover..."Why?""Yes... why?  
We'd all seen the light of Umineko. It may have provided the whole world with the necessary intellectual level to finally...  
fight back against the weird and bizarre urges of Shipping. And yet you...!  
And yet you forced this disgusting plague upon everyone!""Even at his lowest... David Cage only forced his shower scenes on those willing to pay for them.  
You've corrupted a whole world with this poison!""Hahahahahahahha-...  
You fools! Unlike your David, who thought he was becoming an auteur, we never had any illusions.  
We knew we were trash! We knew we could never truly amount to anything in the competitive world of fanfiction!  
It's a world full of wonder and talent! It'a a world where My Little Pony/Buffy the Vampire Slayer cross-over exists!  
How could we compete with that?  
No, you see: there are only really two ways of attaining true equality...  
You can either bring up the lowest...  
or you can bring down the highest.  
We brought everyone down to our level, to the level of Shipping; because we could!  
Because unlike your David, who left himself open to attack, who let the Best Friends see what he had wrought, we understood!  
The only way we could spread our fanfictions across the world and be accepted was to bring everyone to our level! The level -of a fanboy."  
The Plotters...  
Drew their weapons. The Plotter in red... took out Mjolnir...  
"We saw what you did with Gungnir!  
Please: did you really think chunnibyou could defeat us?  
We've seen all the seasons of Love and other Delusions! We know all about Chunnibyou!"  
The other plotter... slowly raised his hands... the rooftop slowly... lowered...  
Or rather, they were all rising.  
Below them was the entire world of Neotokyo.  
Would it be saved? Or thrown into the Eternal Darkness of Shipping?  
Only this final battle of Ultimate Chunnibyou would decide."Irrestible Force of the God's Spear!"  
Dai threw Gungnir at the Plotters;  
"Immovable Shield of the Otaku!"  
A sheer wall of moe harem screenshots - K-on!, iDOLM ASTER, - guarded the Plotters...  
Gungnir and the Wall coalesced into a pure ball of chunni energy...  
The Ball of Chunni would expand until it consumed the entire world...  
no doubt this had been the Plotter's intention from the very start...Only one person could stop this.  
One person who had known chunnibyou for much of her life.  
Who had stood by one of the most painfully afflicted by this disorder.  
Only she could pronounce the Word of Power that would defuse this.  
But...No...! Even the barriers between fandoms had been torn down! "Tuturu~!"  
She therefore appeared; and the Plotters Ball of Chunni was defused;  
furthermore, her purity and brightness, as befitting a true best girl, confused and dazed the Plotters..."Now's our chance!"  
Kanon rushed through the gap created and struck down the first Plotter, the one in red...  
The one whose sprite was already in use by Umineko proper."Ugh! You people make me sick!  
I didn't think I'd have to resort to this...  
but here it is!  
Shipping Syndrome!"  
He unleased a horde of blood red butterflies... no, moths... from his mouth.  
They encircled around each of the Ushiromiyas, Mayuri, and Dai..."Ugh... what..."  
Dai's sickness had been worsening for some time now.  
Probably... the emotional damage was to blame.  
After all; how could such a disaster in...  
romance...  
fail to have such an effect?  
"R-right... I.. fought with... who was it? My..."  
Of course; it wasn't like she could easily remember much about...  
that...  
In times of stress... the human mind is easily swayed...  
"Oh... right. That probably explains it.."  
That's right.  
So, if the wound was caused by love... there was probably...  
"only... one way... to heal...""Ihihihi!~"  
It was Battler... it wasn't unusual for a friend to visit someone in hospital.  
Perhaps it was a little stranger for him to have flowers...  
especially such lovely roses! Which gave off the aroma of summer; fighting off (battling, ihihi) the stale hospital atmosphere.  
"Batt...ler?"  
Of course.  
And..  
"How have you recovered, Dai?"  
"We..ll, I... what?"  
"Playing coy, hmmm? Well! It's not like I can blame you! Ihihihi~"  
"Something is.. wrong, Battler... werrn't we..."  
No; nothing was wrong.  
Nothing was wrong as Battler explained his feelings for Dai...  
and... and..."No!"  
Borne by some mysterious sense of agency, Dai ran out into the hallway..."Did you think you could escape?"  
"You!""Everyone has a shard of Shipping deep inside their heart, Dai.  
I've brought yours up to the surface quite a few times now... but I think you'll succumb soon enough."  
"What is this?!"  
"What? Why, this is simply the worst fate of all fates: you are trapped, Dai, just as the others were...  
In a sterotypical hurt/comfort romance fanfic!"  
"NOoooooooooooooOooooooooOOoooooooooo!"  
Can Dai ever escape?  
Will there ever be an end to this fanfiction?  
Maybe; maybe...  
What can change the nature of a man?  
It is regret; enough regret to build a fortress?  
Is it love; enough love to see what can not be seen?  
Or...  
Is it Shipping; enough Shipping to get senpai to notice your post?  
Battler... didn't know the answer to this question.  
But he knew one thing. He knew one... very important thing.  
You can't abandon your was in the library.  
Supposedly, she was studying.  
But, really, she was doing something else.  
She was reading a visual novel...  
it was called... Friday the 13th Zero.  
She thought that reading about a murderer would help her, just in case she ever wanted to kill someone; say, for instance, using a cleaver.  
However, the visual novel did not provide much infomation about the mechanics of serial killing. Rena was a little disappointed.  
She went on Steam to find another visual novel to read.  
She found one... she found...something.  
It was called... "Everlasting Summer".  
She...opened up the page for it.  
It wasn't very kyute; but you can't always judge based on appearances.  
You just can't...you just... can't.  
I wonder... I wonder, she thought: could this be a good visual novel in disguise?  
So... she sealed her fate. She opened up .  
Later... Battler was talking to his friend, the witch and loli Bernkastel.  
She wasn't very nice, honestly; but in the harsh world of Dithy-kun fanfiction you take what you can get.  
Battler was telling Bernkastel about all his Higurashi merchandise.  
It... didn't take very long for Bernkastel to catch on.  
"Battler... isn't it weird?  
All of this merchandise is of that one character... Rena, right?  
Why is that? Is she just the most popular?"a choked laugh... and placed his hand on his head, as if buying time.  
"Well... I mean I guess so... it's not like I only looked for merchandise involving her..."  
Some excerpts from Battler's Internet history:  
'Rena Ryuugu images'.  
'Rena Ryuugu figurines'.  
'Rena x Ushiromiya Battler fanfiction'.  
'Rena Higurashi poster'.  
'Rena ryuugu dakimakura low price'  
'rena ryugu daki full-size anatomically accurate'...  
None of these terms were mentioned to Bernkastel of course.  
But... she probably could see it all in Battler's eyes.  
"Battler."  
"Y-yes?"  
"Tell me a little about her. About Rena."  
Battler looked a little encouraged when he heard the word "her".  
He energetically listed off all of Rena's many attractive qualities.  
She was cute.  
She was kind.  
She was friendly, but defensive of those close to her, or even of strangers.  
That was just the kind of person she was... a great person.  
She was very cutely able to get flustered but also reliable in times of difficulty.  
She was-!  
"Battler."  
"Sh...  
Yes?"  
"Stop it. I understand.  
...Many people have waifus."  
It was as if those words had shot a hole through a dam. Frustation poured through, and tears streamed down Battler's face.  
"I... I just...!"  
"I understand, Battler...  
I don't normally say things like this, but, if it will help...  
I once had a waifu myself."  
"R-really?"  
"Yes..."  
Bernkastel... looked troubled by the memory.  
Battler was thankful that she was pushing such things to the top of her mind just for his benefit.  
But... once an otaku, always scarred. They needed to support each other.  
Even the cold Bernkastel understood that.  
It was in a small town, just like the one in Higurashi.  
I was just a normal, every-day loli.  
And I knew someone named Satoko.  
Everyone shipped us together... well, we just ignored it at first.  
"But over time, things changed. We began to really feel 'that way' about each other.  
Everyone there was supportive, because of the positive impacts of yuri manga circulation (get your friends to read as well).  
Still, we were young, and we worried about our future.  
Eventually... the anime we were in ended, and all we had was a single kissing scene at the end...  
Well, that's still better than what some couples get.  
But we were put back into our studios waiting rooms, in case they ever made another OVA.  
We... weren't put together.  
I was searching the Internet, soon after, and eventually we found each other again online.  
It wasn't perfect, but just being able to talk to each other was something to cherish.  
Because we were characters, we ended up buying a lot of each other's merchandise... and well, we each called the other our 'waifu'.  
Maybe it's a bit unconventional for a waifu relationship, but..."


End file.
